Posts Tagged books

This is a new “feature” I’m going to try doing on my blog. It sounds like a good idea at this moment, but like blogging (which also sounded like a good idea at that moment), we shall see. I’m calling it What I’m Reading, but I guess it’s more accurately, What I just Read. That doesn’t sound quite as good though. I may have to play with that title a bit 😉

So, as you can see from the title, I just read Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin: A Memoir of Our Tumultuous Years. I don’t usually post or even talk much about my political beliefs because it just leads no where good when people talk politics or religion. However, people very close to me know that one of my guilty pleasures is following all things Sarah Palin.

She is like the gift that just keeps giving. A trainwreck that you can’t look away from no matter how hard you try. She moves from one gaffe to the next with seemingly absolutely no self-awareness. How can you *not* love that.

Imagine my excitement when not 1, not 2, but 3 “tell-all” books are slated to come out about her this year and that does not include the one by Levi Johnston her former son-in-law to be and a brand new one on “babygate” that is supposedly coming out sometime around September or something like that. It’s a good year to be a Sarah Palin watcher!

Ok, so the Blind Allegiance book. It’s pretty good! I wasn’t sure what to expect really, other than I hoped a bit of entertainment because after a kerfluffle earlier this year in which rival author Joe McGinnis leaked a copy of the first rough draft of manuscript to several media outlets, some bloggers and who knows who all else it’s been known that the book contained unredacted copies of Palin’s emails sent on the yahoo accounts she made to keep govt business secret.

Almost three years later, those emails have still not been released thanks to the amazing foot dragging by the Department of Law in Alaska. They are slated to be released very soon, so it will be interesting to see if anything made it past the black marker of the redacting hammer, but I digress.

Blind Allegiance is co-written by Frank Bailey (a Palin staffer, who was with her in her run up to winning the election), Ken Morris (who I know nothing about other than he bid on a dinner with Palin once and it ended in a kerfluffle of some kind, as does everything connected to Palin) and Jeanne Devon (a/k/a AKMuckraker of The Mudflats blog).

I have to say that even without the emails, some of which were pretty juicy, in a “I can’t believe she actually said that!” kind of way, the book was quite good. The emails were just gravy for me by the time I got a couple chapters into the book.

Sarah comes off as likable in the beginning and when I told one of my friends that I was reading this book and that at the point I was at, she was likable and I could understand how someone could be drawn into her circle, he suggested I read the book backwards and watch her grow rather than read forward and watch her disintegrate 😉

Unfortunately, Sarah being likable doesn’t last for very long. She shows her true colors, admittedly lightly even before the primary and I suppose one could write some of it off as the pressure of running a campaign on a grassroots level with a shoestring budget. By the time the general election rolls around, there is no denying that she is just plain bad news with no morals, though.

Bailey comes off as fairly sympathetic. He did some *really* bad stuff for Sarah, as did all her inner circle. To his credit, he readily admits he did some really bad stuff for Sarah and he doesn’t play the victim card, unlike her. He is clearly wired a bit differently than I am because I can’t imagine being *that* loyal to someone and I am a pretty loyal person myself. Bailey took a few trips under the bus for Sarah during their time together and he kept getting back up and dusting himself off for another go. His wife is the real saint in this story. I would not have been shocked to read that he got divorced during that time, but somehow his marriage survived, which I think says more about his wife, than him, to be honest.

The book does a good job of portraying Sarah about how she seems if you have followed her story at all since she stepped foot into the National spotlight, as a vapid, vindictive, mean girl that cares only about herself, fame, and money.

I don’t want to give too much of the book away because it is a good read, but a few of the things that are revealed include (“They” is Palin and her inner circle):

How they used software to rig online polls in their favor;

How they wrote letters to the editor and then had people put their own names on them;

How they spent very little time actually governing and so *much* time on vindictive payback schemes;

Quite a bit about Troopergate;

Illegal action during the campaign for Governor by having contact with a 3rd party that was running ads (the RGA).

I think this book should be required reading for anyone that thinks she is qualified (emotionally, intellectually, mentally) to hold *any* political office. It does not paint a pretty picture.